The North
Caucasus has been a treacherous place—and a potentially deadly topic—for independent
journalists. CPJ has documented dozens of cases of harassment and attacks
committed by all sides against journalists in Chechnya, where two wars have
raged, and its neighboring republics, Dagestan and Ingushetia, beset by
outbursts of violence.

But the
ultimate method of silencing journalists and other critics has come from the
barrel of a gun. As many as seven journalists may have been targeted for murder
since 2000 because of their reporting on the region. Preceding chapters have
recounted the cases of Paul Klebnikov, Anna Politkovskaya, and Magomed
Yevloyev.

Journalists
Vladimir Yatsina, Magomedzagid Varisov, Telman Alishayev, and Anastasiya
Baburova also covered developments in the region, and they, too, were murdered.
Authorities say they have identified­ several suspects in these cases—and have
killed some—but colleagues and relatives of the journalists are deeply
skeptical about the official handling of these cases. They are troubled by the
opaque nature of the investigations, the contradictory public statements made
by authorities in some instances, and the general failure of investigators and
prosecutors to communicate with even those closest to the victims.

In mid-July
1999, Vladimir Yatsina, 51, took a leave from his job at the Russian news
agency ITAR-TASS and traveled to the North Caucasus on a freelance assignment
to photograph Chechen fighters encamped in Ingushetia. According to press and
family reports, Yatsina traveled with Magomed Uspayev, an ethnic Chechen and
Moscow university student, who was to be his fixer.

Heidi Hollinger, a Canadian photojournalist, had passed along Uspayev’s
name to Yatsina, according to her lawyer, Nicolas Plourde. Hollinger told
Yatsina that she did not know Uspayev well and that his credentials should be verified,
the lawyer said in a written statement to CPJ. Hollinger had no other contact
with either man, the lawyer said.

After the
photographer and fixer landed at an airport in Ingushetia, news reports said,
Uspayev handed Yatsina to members of the Akhmadov clan, a criminal gang
notorious for kidnappings, and went on the run. A month later, kidnappers
called Yatsina’s wife and sought US$2 million in ransom, a demand they later
made to ITAR-TASS as well. Neither the family nor the agency paid the sum, and
the Russian Interior Ministry would not negotiate with the kidnappers.

In late
February 2000, two former captives told Russian prosecutors they had seen
Yatsina’s body in the mountains of Chechnya, Amnesty International reported. A
Kazakh national, Alisher Orozaliyev, whom Chechen kidnappers had held hostage
at the same location as Yatsina, said the gang members had killed the
journalist while retreating from the Russian army. On February 20, a group of
hostages was being transferred to the village of Shatoi, Orozaliyev said at a
press briefing shortly after his release. “Yatsina had health problems—he had
bad feet, couldn’t walk any longer, although only five kilometers remained. The
rebels shot him dead. We arrived in the village and were to stay there. But
then bombing started and we had to go down into the forest. On the way back, we
saw his body.”

Yatsina’s
wife, Svetlana Golovenkova, told CPJ that she and other family members learned
of the death from television news reports. It was a stunning way to get the
news for Golovenkova, who said she had personally appealed to 20 different
officials for help in the case. All had promised to keep her informed of
developments, she said.

After the
captives gave their statements, the Interior Ministry sent a special forces
unit to recover Yatsina’s body. The unit retrieved remains from the site where
Yatsina was believed to have been killed, but tests later showed that they
belonged to an animal, Novaya Gazeta reporter Vyacheslav Izmailov, a veteran of
the region, told CPJ.

While the
armed conflict in Chechnya might understandably impede efforts to arrest
Yatsina’s killers, no such obstacle seemed to stand in the way of questioning
Uspayev, who was reportedly seen in Moscow in the months after the abduction.
Uspayev remained in the country until 2002, when he fled to Sweden under an
assumed name, according to Izmailov, who reported on the case and who once
served as a military officer in the North Caucasus.

In
correspondence with Golovenkova in 2002 and 2003, local prosecutors said they
were aware Uspayev had fled the country. But it wasn’t until 2005—after
Golovenkova had filed a formal complaint with the Prosecutor General’s Office
in Moscow—that authorities placed Uspayev’s name on Interpol’s international
wanted list.

In October
2006, Swedish police arrested Uspayev, who was then using yet another name, on
a disorderly conduct charge and asked their Russian colleagues to confirm his
identity, according to local reports. His identity verified by Chechen
prosecutors, Russian authorities filed a request for extradition on charges
related to the abduction and killing, according to prosecutors. In October
2007, the Swedish government rejected the extradition request, saying it feared
that an ethnic Chechen would not get a fair trial in Russia, according to
prosecutors and press reports.

In a June 12 statement, the Swedish Prosecutor General’s Office told CPJ
it is conducting its own investigation into Uspayev’s alleged role in the case.
The prosecutor’s office said it is also examining whether it could bring its
own criminal case. Uspayev could not be located for comment.

According to press reports, many of the Akhmadov brothers who led the
criminal gang were killed during the Chechen conflict. One, Ruslan, was
arrested in 2001 in Azerbaijan and extradited to Russia, where he was sentenced
to 10 years in prison for other crimes. Authorities have disclosed noinformation on what
role, if any, the Akhmadov brothers played in Yatsina’s murder.

Magomedzagid
Varisov, 54, a political analyst for Dagestan’s largest weekly, Novoye
Delo,
and head of a think tank, the Center for Strategic Initiatives and Political
Technologies, was shot in a contract-style assassination on June 28, 2005. At
least two unidentified assailants fired on Varisov’s car near his house in
Dagestan’s capital, Makhachkala, killing the journalist and wounding his
driver, according to press reports. Varisov’s wife, who was also in the
vehicle, was unharmed. Police said they collected 24 bullet casings from the scene.

Several
sources told CPJ that Varisov appeared to have been targeted for his writing,
which was critical of many people across the political spectrum. In his Novoye
Delo
column, Varisov examined the spread of militant Islam and scrutinized human rights
abuses committed by federal forces in the region. In particular, the journalist
examined a recent Russian army sweep in the Chechen border town of
Borozdinovskaya, which resulted in the killing of one civilian and the
disappearance of several others. Days before his murder, Varisov told the
German paper Berliner Zeitung that Chechen authorities were unable to
control their own territory and were responsible for the spread of violence to
Dagestan. Chechen guerrillas easily cross the border into Dagestan, he told Berliner
Zeitung,
which published its article the day Varisov was shot.

A local
Islamist group, Shariat, claimed responsibility for Varisov’s murder, calling
him a mouthpiece for the Kremlin and the “Dagestani puppet regime” in a
statement published on its Web site. Ten days later, police ambushed and killed
Ruslan Makasharipov, the group’s reputed leader, and announced that he was a
suspect in Varisov’s murder and a dozen other crimes.

The next year,
on April 10, 2006, police gunned down another man they called a suspect in the
slaying. Press reports said police in Makhachkala exchanged gunfire with a man
named Makhach Rasulov while trying to apprehend him. Rasulov, a one-time
colleague of Varisov at Novoye Delo­, died at the
scene. Press reports described Rasulov as a former government interpreter who
had become a follower of Wahhabism, a conservative form of Sunni Islam.

Authorities have not made public any evidence to support assertions that
the two men were involved in Varisov’s murder. The suspects’ precise roles in
the slaying have not been spelled out; neither is it clear whether any other
people were involved in the killing. Prosecutors told CPJ in February 2007 that
the Varisov case had been closed.

The journalist’s son, Varis, said he is skeptical of the official
account. Varis Varisov, himself a government investigator with the Dagestan
Investigative Committee, said a statement from a detained Chechen guerrilla had
purportedly connected Makasharipov to the murder. But Varisov said he found
inconsistencies between the statement and details of the killing. He said he
asked his colleagues to restart the investigation, but it was to no avail. The
case will be solved, Varisov said, “only if, by miracle, we discover something
new.” The
Dagestan prosecutor’s office did not immediately respond to CPJ’s April 2009
request for comment.

Telman
Alishayev, 39, a reporter and a host for the Makhachkala-based Islamic
television channel TV-Chirkei, covered social issues such as education, AIDS,
and drug addiction from a religious perspective, his colleagues told CPJ.

On September
2, 2008, two unidentified assailants shot Alishayev as he was returning home in
his car. He died at the hospital the next morning. Several CPJ sources said the
slaying was likely prompted by a 2006 documentary that Alishayev produced,
“Ordinary Wahhabism,” which criticized the conservative form of Sunni Islam and
its spread in the republic. The business daily Kommersant reported that
Alishayev received threats shortly after the film was released, and that one
Islamist group had placed his name on an online “death list.”

Two days after
the attack, investigators identified two suspects: Vadim Butdayev and Rustam
Umalatov, reputed members of a local Wahhabi group. Butdayev was also wanted in
connection with the murder of a police officer in Makhachkala that occurred
earlier the same day, local press reports said. The Dagestan Interior Ministry
said witnesses had identified Butdayev as the gunman; it did not specify
Umalatov’s role.

Butdayev never
stood trial. On November 17, 2008, Interior Ministry officers seeking to arrest
Butdayev and three other men in Makhachkala exchanged gunfire with the suspects
and killed all four, the news agency RIA Dagestan reported. Umalatov’s whereabouts
are unclear. Dagestan prosecutors did not respond to CPJ’s written request for
comment on the status of the inquiry.

The
journalist’s brother, Akhmad, told CPJ that he doubts there was any genuine
investigation in the killing. “They named the suspects the day after the
murder—and there was nothing after,” the brother said. Authorities never
informed the family about developments in the case, he added.

Novaya
Gazeta
reporter Anastasiya Baburova, 25, was shot around 3 p.m. on January 19, 2009,
on a downtown Moscow street
withinwalking
distance of the Kremlin. She had just covered a news conference at which
prominent human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov fiercely denounced the early
prison release of a Russian army officer convicted in the March 2000 abduction
and murder of a Chechen girl. The lawyer and journalist left the Independent
Press Center, where the news conference was held, and were chatting as they
strolled outside.

An unknown
assailant wearing dark clothes and a ski mask followed the two, shooting
Markelov in the back of the head with a pistol fitted with a silencer, Kommersant reported,
citing sources in the Prosecutor General’s Office. Baburova apparently tried to
stop the killer as he strode past, prompting him to shoot her in the head, Kommersant reported,
citing witnesses. Markelov, 34, died at the scene. Baburova died several hours
later in a Moscow hospital.

A journalism
student at Moscow State University who freelanced for Novaya
Gazeta,
Baburova had contributed reports on neo-Nazi groups and race-motivated crimes
since October 2008, Deputy Editor Sergei Sokolov told CPJ. She had earlier
written for the state-controlled daily Izvestiya, covering
business topics.

Officials
offered a mixed response in the aftermath. “The brazenness of this crime
indicates that the killer was sure of his impunity,” Aleksandr Bastrykin,
chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office,
declared in a statement two days after the murder. “Society ought to be sure
that the law works in this country and that no one is permitted to break it.”
But the response from President Dmitry Medvedev was muted. His private
condolences to the newspaper, offered about 10 days after the killings,
generated little news coverage.

The
investigation itself seemed to move in fits and starts. On January 23, Vladimir
Pronin, then-head of the Moscow City Directorate of Internal Affairs, told a
news conference that police had recovered three bullet casings and a bullet
from the crime scene, the news agency Interfax reported. Three days later,
Viktor Biryukov, a spokesman for the agency, told Izvestiya that no such evidence had
been found.